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Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: Redesign Entries IV 42

Journal by CmdrTaco
Man this is getting really time consuming! You guys have had a LOT of entries so far. I'm enjoying seeing them, but I really need to apologize for not giving as detailed of a critique to some entries as to others. There are a number of really great designs that I've seen so far. 3-4 that are good enough to win almost unchanged. But the contest is still wide open.

To address some points made so far: the menu structure is one of the trickiest things to do. I'm open to any ideas for moving them. For javascript trickery. As long as it's backwards compatible, I'll consider any idea. Unfortunately some items in the left hand menu MUST remain visible on the page somewhere. The Sections list. The preferences. And the Vendors & Services boxes. Other boxes can be collapsed, submenued, hidden or whatever, but I think it pretty important that designs have space for login/user info (eg, the 'User' menu in the left hand side). As well the sections list, and biz partnership stuff that needs visibility.

One reader yesterday made a great comment that some designs are using to much green, and I think thats the key. Slashdot's green is a dominating color. When used sparingly (read:todays skin) I think it works very well. Many templates go overboard and lose it.

The best designs typically are dropping the top icons from the upper right hand corner. This is fine. That space can be better utilized for user preferences, user login boxes, search boxes etc. I totally agree with that assesement. But if you start doing zany stuff, it becomes more important to show logged in as well as logged out skins. Otherwise one or the other has a big hole to deal with.

Another person made comment about the 'fairness' of my journal entries. As I explained in the original contest, my concern is not fairness, but rather the best looking Slashdot possible. If someone totally nips another design, that won't stand, but I think everyone should be reading every comment I make here and tweaking their designs where appropriate.

Again what follows is a few entries worth sharing. I apologize for being behind, but at this point I've had nearly a hundred designs, and many hundreds of emails to read and reply to. These entries once again are not necessarily the 'best'. They aren't necessarily winners or losers. But they have elements that I think are worth sharing for some reason or another.

first up is Nathan Apple. His design has very clean left and right sides that I think work really well. Also worth noting is that MANY designs have tried to add another shade of light green to Slashdot, but this shade of light green I think works really well. I think ultimately his articles are a bit generic. I've said this many times, but once you scroll down, this could be any web site. It doesn't look uniquely like Slashdot except perhaps for the topic icons. I appreciate that the header is a totally new redesign, but it just doesn't work for me. I'm all for white space, but Slashdot has a LOT of stuff in the left hand menu that could potentially be put in that upper right hand corner.

Helen Nicholson's design needs some work, but has some cool elements. Her logo has energy, and the graphics she's working with look really nice. Unfortunately they don't seem to line up for me- font dependency issues make them look a little low for me. I suspect that this might be a tricky problem to solve. I think the use of grey on the articles sorta makes it look less like Slashdot, and the dept line is unreadably small on my screen. Putting the topic icons in boxes solves the must-be-on-white problem, but it doesn't look very good. No padding makes it crowded. Also the abbreviated articles get lost. Mostly I share this design to show you the slashboxes, which look quite nice- if only the notches lined up with the text properly... but man, CSS sucks for that sort of thing.

Agnar Ødegård's design does a LOT of interesting things with menus. He puts the user menu up top. The stories menu into tabs. The design itself doesn't light me on fire, but creative thinking about the large volume of navigational elements we have here does.

Marko Mrdjenovic gets mad props for completeness. His design includes articles, comments, the index etc. His header is great, but he silly expanding topic icon thing serves no purpose. I don't care for the use of /. as a bullet point. The color coding in the comments thing is something we've actually talked about quite extensively. It's something we very well may do when we revise the moderation system. Again I don't care for the faded light green. It seems really soft to me somehow, but this is a fantastic design. Very well done.

Next up we have Stefan Lesser's design. I share this one because he does interesting things with both the menu and the article. Like many designs, he moves the menus up top (see my notes above for caveats about this decision). All in all, his system works quite nicely. I think the header is a little dull, but it's clean. The really interesting thing is the totally different take on the layout of articles. I mean. I don't know that it's what I want, but it's very cool. Also, he does something that many of our designers do by making italics in articles be seperatedy for readability. I'm unconvinced on if this is a good idea or not, but it is worth considering. His abbreviated articles are cool. His slashboxes are cool. All in all, this is just a great entry.

Shane's entry is clean and stylish. I kinda like the comic bookish choice of font for the slogan. The gradients behind the article title works really well. Personally I think he is over using the curve- it's on titles, slashboxes, menu headers, the corners of the main frame, and also around the topic icons (see other notes on topic icons mentioned repeatedly above). His abbreviated articles look to be totally unaltered from Slashdot today. I assume he's doing some javascript foo on the menu on the left, but it's not apparent to me what that is. All in all tho, in terms of a design that is purely cosmetic and changes very little functionally, this is a good one.

(Still several to go). Next up Michael Milligan's design tries lots of stuff with varying degrees of success. His topic icons in the header just don't work. I don't care for the square around the topic icons in the article. The gradiants mostly look pretty good (although the block of grey between the tops of the menu and slashboxes, and header look a bit out of place to me. I'd use the white gradient all accross. He is trying zany stuff here with expanding/contracting articles and menus. He also has provided space for a user menu atop the page. His footer is realtively dull. It's just today's footer, with a different color and no search b ox. The gradient above the very last menu spans outside the white box. I think it's worth noting that you aren't required to put the black border around Slashdot. I think this design would work good without the black edges in the main space- keeping the black up top and at the bottom works to bookend the page (as well as contain the advertising atop the page) but this design (like a lot of them I've seen) seems to want to keep the black edge so much, that something is sacrificed. All in all this one is a nice entry, but it would take a lot of work to be seriously considered. The parts are there, they just don't all fit together right.

Andy Peatling's design has many nice elements. The diagonal lines in the header and login space. I totally dig the subtle /. embedded into the left hand menu. I almost universally dislike the use of /. as an iconographic abbreviation of slashdot- but in that spot, it is subtle, and honestly totally perfect. His expanding topic icon mojo at the top of the page is just silly and I think that space is being under utilized. He does the thing where he makes italics in articles be blockquote style indentions. I'm just not sure how I feel about that. It might or might not work. For readability it might work. But it might just be a mess. I really can't decide. I'm reading comments in these so feel free to share opinions since a lot of designs try this. His menu on the left ads a lot of white space, making it Waaaay to long. Some expanding/contracting javascript mojo would help that. So would moving some menu bits to the upper right. Normally I don't care for the white on black text bit, but it works in his slashboxes. He also mocked up an article with comments to show how the design would carry through. I think the whole thing works, but I miss slashdot's green. What it really comes down to, is do I want to read slashboxes in white on grey or black on white... same for article headers. I think the color inversion is nice for menus, but harder for huge chunks of text. Choose one and stick with it. But all in all this is a very strong design. Clean. Simple. Well done.

HAZAH! I am through my favorites from tuesday. I still have several entries from wednesday and already a few from today. Comments are once again enabled. Play nicely.

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Redesign Entries IV More

Redesign Entries IV

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  • last one == winner (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Demerol ( 306753 )
    I think the last one here is the bestof them all by far, thus far. If he fixes up the tabs up top (but I personally don't mind them because I find the icons in the top bar useless and pretty ugly), then it should be the tops so far.

    In case our favorite themes don't win the contest, will it still be possible to download the css to use in our browsers to override the site? I think the white on (almost) black is good.

    • Re:last one == winner (Score:3, Interesting)

      by FortKnox ( 169099 ) *
      It has too much whitespace for my liking. Everything is spaced out too much, IMHO. The second to last one (MrAndrews?) was my fav as far as layout. Subtle, new, yet still very familiar. The rolling/autohiding on the articles may be too much, but the look and feel is good, though probably can use a little bit of tweaking...
      • The rolling/autohiding thing is my using script.aculo.us [aculo.us] instead of rolling my own. Couldn't find documentation to make it just BE rolled up to start. I reckon that's a neat way to have abridged articles in the main page, and not have to necessarily click through to read the full one.

        I'm tweaking on a regular basis, so if anything specific pops into anyone's head, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
        • I got some suggestions to try.
          The way the articles are encircled... a curve in the upper and lower left... Do that with the menu on the left or at least the slashboxes on the right. All the whitespace between slashboxes and articles... change it to black. That way the articles and boxes will 'hover above the rest of the page'.

          Dunno if that'll work or not, but I'd like to see those happen with your design and then check it out again...
          • Thanks for the ideas... gave 'em a very rough shot here: http://www.dustrunners.com/slashdot/indexd.php [dustrunners.com]

            I think some other elements would need to change their appearance to make this work, but it almost seems to solve part of my "feels too busy" problem. Not sure, though... I'm more often dead wrong than sorta right.
            • Wow... that looks REALLY good now. Only other suggestion I have is to round the lower left of the slashboxes, but other than that, it is, by far, my favorite. Looks like taco wants you to do something with the footer, but I don't know what else you could do....

              And don't forget to resubmit when you feel its at version 2. I'm rootin for ya!
            • FYI - made a JE about it here [slashdot.org] so there may be some other suggestions in there to try if you like'm...
      • i like the rolling deal for the one liners that don't 'make' the front page. kind of nice to be able to load the summary without actually going to it.
    • Am I the only that likes being able to tell at a glance how many new stories there are since I last reloaded the page without having to scroll down the page? Besides, it's one of those things that makes Slashdot feel like Slashdot.

      Some of the topic icons are a bit dated though. How about a new contest to replace them? I know there's a 150 of them, but what if you could win a $5 subscription for each one you get approved? Unlike a laptop, it wouldn't really cost Slashdot anything, except potential lost reven
      • That would more likely become gained revenue, however, because it's very likely that some or even most of the people who win would not already have been subscribers to slashdot. Then, by getting to try it out for free, there's a good chance they will stay on as paying subscribers afterward to not lose the privileges they came to appreciate.
  • I just realized I've been incorporating the comments into the linked-to version rather than my 2.0 copy, so some of the things in the write-up will not make sense anymore. Sorry for the confusion!

    (my design is http://www.dustrunners.com/slashdot [dustrunners.com])
  • In my opinion, the contrast of those white-on-gray slashboxes is really attractive...and I'm actually a fan of the blockquoting in articles, however, I think Andy's implementation is a little to dominating. Those large quotes with the gray fade really draw the eyes away from the text (which isn't a good thing). Other than that, his design is sexy (especially the commentin on the articles).
  • I really like Nathan Apples design. Cool, clean and a nice break from typical Slashdot. Stefan's article redesign should be implemented no matter what design is chosen, that's just a much better way to do things. Generally, I really like use of the indented quotes like in Andy Peatling's, but it just doesn't work for Slashdot. When probably 90% of the "article" is a quotation from a user, the indent loses it's emphasis and structure.

    It seems that Taco really likes the design that look a lot like the current
  • > I've said this many times, but once you scroll down, this could be any web site.
    > It doesn't look uniquely like Slashdot except perhaps for the topic icons.

    Once the reader has already scrolled down, he already knows on what website he's surfing, he just wants to read.
    The contest will be over and he doesn't care of the design anymore. Kill the fancy things and let him read.

    Now it's a design contest so you wish some energic/fancy things.

    But Slashdot is just content and the design just serve
    • Very much agreed (although mine collapses things a lot in its current state)... I was thinking the default state would have all boxes expanded, and then they could be collapsed by the user and the preferences would retain that as the default state... but I'm wondering if the left-hand column is set up like slashboxes are... can we assume it won't be mind-bogglingly difficult to apply preferences over there too?

      I'm trying to make sure any effects or funky stuff is done through javascript first, so people wit

    • > I've said this many times, but once you scroll down, this could be any web site.
      > It doesn't look uniquely like Slashdot except perhaps for the topic icons.

      Once the reader has already scrolled down, he already knows on what website he's surfing, he just wants to read.
      The contest will be over and he doesn't care of the design anymore. Kill the fancy things and let him read.

      Having a strong site identity even after scrolling down the page is still important. Here are some reasons:

      • If you ha
  • Just if anyone knows, are one allowed to post more than a single entry?
  • I think my favorite that I've seen by far is Michael Milligan's entry. It still looks like Slashdot, but it is updated and has a strong design. I especially like the lines behind the logo. Renders great for me in Safari.

    I'd also like to point out... I can't see Marko Mrdjenovic's entry. The link takes me to a page that describes it, but I don't see a link to what it actually looks like.

    Thanks for these journal entries. It's fascinating to watch this process and see all these great entries.

  • Hi there, I'm Agnar. I was worried about my design being a bit too "sweet" with too meny gradiant buttons. Perhaps I should try more flat colors instead? I kept the format of the stories "identical" to todays design. I guess they could get better as well.
  • Where's the "Nataly Portman" theme? The "Hot Grits" theme?
    The "I Welcome our new alien overlords" theme? The "Balmer's head on a pole" theme?

    Where's the claymation theme? The Napkin theme? The Andrew Widgets theme? Leopard Skin? Jolt Cola? Alligator?

    Let's get creative people! We've seen the green/gray/white/black thing. Show us something magic.

  • Why do almost all of the designs look like someone spilled some kind of colored goo over some type of shiny metal? And why are so few of them thinking about typography?
    • 1) It looks nice (subjective, yes) 2) Its how the internet "looks" in 2006 - this is a design "update" contest - we want to make things look current, 3) there are still very large limitations in how a css/html project can look (especially when you can't monkey with the code much). Things like adding gradients to div backgrounds is popular because it works well and looks a bit more interesting than just flat color. -Xy

    • My fairly plain entry [polycrystal.org]. I like some things about it... not all. What do you think?

      I agree with your sentiments. The designs are pretty, but when slashdot is more readable in a text browser than in Firefox there's a problem.

  • Well (Score:1)

    by linvir ( 970218 )
    At least one thing is becoming crystal clear from these entries: it'd be very very difficult to screw this up and end up ruining Slashdot visually. But that in turn only replaces old pressure with new! Haha!
  • Hey Taco, nice job so far with keeping on top of the entries!

    That being said, I have a few words to say about the icons. Many people have been bashing them, saying they are outdated, do not properly reflect the times, etc. While I think its true that some of them could use a workover, the vast majority of them (ie the older ones) give history to Slashdot, a certain rough edge that differentiates it from the vast majority of other sites that are always/attempt to be super duper clean with fuzzy borders, s
  • I sent a link to redesign at cmdrtaco.net this past Sunday but my server logs show that nobody, beyond myself from work, have viewed the images. Did they not get through?
  • http://www.dustrunners.com/slashdot/indexc.php [dustrunners.com]

    Different layout entirely, but maybe it works? I'm just wastin' time, as you can see.
    • Sir, your waste of time although you admit to all of its flaws is the only design that I have personally seen that shows significant forward thinking.
    • If it looked better in Opera, it would have been quite nice. Same goes for the other one as well.
      • What version of Opera are you on? Admittedly I only glanced at it in 8.5 before I posted it here, but it didn't seem to be any different than Firefox. I guess I'm going to have to dig out my old browser archives soon, yeah? Oh, joy. Oh, rapture.
        • I'm on 8.5. It's not a HUGE deal. It's kind of that the bottom part of the letters in "Read more" and such are slightly outside the box. And the topic images cover the borders above and below.

          But I had a look in Firefox, and it looked similar, so I guess it's just a matter of tweaking it a bit :)

          Nice idea with the alternative layout, by the way.

          • Ah, yes indeed. I see those too. I made the "Read more" totally wrong and haven't gone back to change it yet... it's a fixed height (for some reason), so if you increase the font size it'll break wonderfully.

            If I had a to-do list, that'd be on it.

            Thanks, too, to everyone that's said nice things about my efforts. It's really tricky cramming so much need-to-have data onto a page, but I think so far everyone that's submitted stuff has done a really great job. Can't wait to see how this turns out!
  • Perhaps I'm just a stick in the mud - but personally, I prefer the current design over anything I've seen so far. The current design is functional, works well - and really, unlike cars, Slashdot doesn't really need facelifting every few years.
  • The blockquote thing totally removes the ambiguity about who is saying what. That is a very good thing. Whatever design wins, ought to have this.

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